Innehållsförteckning för August 2023 från Edge

As we’ve discussed here in the past, one of the reasons zombies are so effective is because they’re so familiar – they are literally us, at least on the inside. The closer something is to home, the easier it is to relate, and therefore the more susceptible we are when those particular buttons are pressed. It extends to settings, too. The shopping malls of Capcom’s Dead Rising series work so well because we’ve spent time in these places – if not the American ones, then all of the others around the world built in their image. There is power in familiarity, then, but giving players something they’ve seen before has its own issues. Old Man Murray was lampooning crates in videogames more than 20 years ago, and yet such containers…

There’s a true story about teaching videogame history that’s always charmed me. Andy Baio, a lifelong gamer, wanted his son Eliot to love and appreciate them too. Not just the newest games and consoles, but the classics. But, he reasoned, wouldn’t most children shun punishingly hard games from the ’70s and ’80s if they’d tasted the delights of triple-A titles such as Destiny and Call Of Duty? What to do? Baio crafted the perfect plan: he would speedrun his son through 25 years of videogame history in just four years. It started on Eliot’s fourth birthday when Baio gave him a Namco-branded mini console that played Galaxian, Dig Dug and various Pac-Man games dating back to the ’80s – which Baio Jr loved – along with an old Atari VCS,…

Developer/publisher Valve Format PC Origin US Release Summer Anyone seeking clues to the inscrutable Valve’s grand plan for Counter-Strike should look back at CS:GO’s release back in 2012. Here was a game intended to finally break Counter-Strike into the console markets after a decade of popularity on PC. It felt alarmingly different to Counter-Strike: Source. The community feared the skills they’d honed over years would become redundant in order to let a new generation into the streets of de_dust2. That very well might have been the case, too, before Valve took over control from erstwhile developer Hidden Path and performed an about-turn over a period of years. By the time it was pointing magnetic north again, CS:GO became something nobody could have anticipated – not just the bedrock of competitive…

Developer Summerfall Studios Publisher Humble Games Format PC Origin Australia Release August 3 Grace has been at a loose end since leaving college, a fact that hasn’t escaped the notice of best friend Freddie, a drummer and lyricist who invites her to a band audition. When, hours later, an exasperated Grace sighs, “I wish I knew where I fit”, we know she’s not just talking about her role in the group. Once the others have left, she vocalises her feelings in song, her voice attracting a young woman who joins in, before introducing herself as Calliope. The title’s a clue that there’s a fantastical element to this world, and if you know your Greek mythology, you’ll be aware that this stranger is the last of the Muses. As the two…

Henrique Olifiers is busy. The studio he co-founded, Bossa, has just announced its new project, a sweeping co-op action adventure he hopes will keeps his design team occupied for the next two decades. On the face of it, Lost Skies feels like a departure for Bossa in that it doesn’t seem to have much in common with the games that brought it most notice, including the Surgeon Simulator series, I Am Bread and I Am Fish. But that would be to ignore Worlds Adrift, the massively multiplayer sandbox game powered by SpatialOS that launched into Early Access in 2017 and ran aground two years later. Lost Skies exists in the same universe as Worlds Adrift, which comes as no surprise when you factor in the new game’s customisable airships, its…

STILL PLAYING The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Switch One of the privileges of playing a game early is the vicarious enjoyment that comes from witnessing the responses from friends and peers after the fact. We’re heartened to discover that many have shared our sense of wonder and exhilaration at the journey to the Wind Temple – and quietly pleased that plenty have found the Fire Temple equally annoying. And now we get to be inspired – and, yes, humbled – by the problem-solving ingenuity of other players. Of course brightblooms make for effective headlights in The Depths. Naturally you can attach a minecart to your shield to use as a skateboard of sorts. And, yes, the TTP was always going to be measured in picoseconds, but a…

Q+A: Takayuki Nakayama, director Takayuki Nakayama (right) first played Street Fighter when he was nine years old on an arcade cabinet in the corner of a sweet shop close to his home in Gunma Prefecture, a hundred or so kilometres north of Tokyo. He describes himself as a middling player – the root, perhaps, of Street Fighter 6’s concessions to novices. Having been made director of Street Fighter V, he felt as if he was racing to catch up with a schedule that had run away from the development team. Street Fighter 6 was always going to be his first big swing at the series. Where did the idea for the mode that became World Tour originate? What were your goals? When developing this game’s predecessor, Street Fighter V, we…

Something was wrong with the Citadel station’s onboard AI, Shodan, and Abe Ghiran knew it. When Shodan began to take control of the station, he joined a resistance of surviving crew members. He made a safe house above a radioactive trench down on medical and left voice logs inviting other survivors to join them. When Shodan seized control of maintenance deck, shutting out all crew from the bridge, he identified a shortcut through the engineering level and tried to take her down. The others in his party were killed, but Ghiran persevered, trying to remain methodical. When you first meet Ghiran, he’s in five pieces. Whatever took place in this room before you arrive, the brutality with which it concluded contrasts unsettlingly with his calm and brave voice logs. He’s…

Trapped with an unkillable monster inside a First World War bunker, survival feels like a tough assignment, but still less so than the one Frictional Games has set itself here. An early loading screen message encourages us to experiment with its world, boldly concluding: “If you think something may be possible to do, it probably is”. That organic agency couples with a commitment to conjuring horror from a single enemy, following in the footsteps of Alien: Isolation. Yet by the time we find ourselves cowering under a table, praying the creature doesn’t return our gaze, The Bunker is clearly delivering on its promise. The underground hideout in question is home from home for a squad of French soldiers in 1916, where they await orders beneath the whistles and cracks of…

How do you approach depicting one of fantasy literature’s most iconic characters? It’s nearimpossible to separate our image of Gollum from his previous incarnations, whether as a scheming riddler in Tolkien’s books or as a sympathetic monster in the films of Peter Jackson. Daedalic Entertainment clearly feels similarly, having recruited actor Wayne Forester to do a serviceable Andy Serkis impersonation while rooting his character in Tolkien’s love for riddles. Yet The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum pales in comparison to the works it tries to imitate, missing the mark in almost every way. What makes Gollum compelling as a supporting character fades when he takes the spotlight, the back-and-forth between his personalities grating. Gollum bills itself as the “hidden story” of its titular villain, charting his time as a slave…

Link up Like most people, every waking minute of the past week has involved playing and consuming Tears Of The Kingdom content, but while my timeline has been completely inundated with crazy contraptions and crucified Koroks, it’s Ascend that has surprised me the most out of Link’s arsenal of new powers. Being able to create pretty much anything with Ultrahand is obviously the main draw here, but my withered, feeble brain is limited to maybe a few lopsided wheels either side of a plank of wood before it gets overwhelmed. However, being able to phase through pretty much any obstacle completely subverts my understanding of what an adventure game can be, in the best possible way. Issue 385 Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com.…

Game-makers often talk about design by subtraction, even as the industry tends to promote the idea that more is better. We’re more certain than ever that editing is the secret to a truly great game – though that needn’t always mean taking away. In some cases, editing can mean adding something – and that process can still simultaneously have a subtractive effect. Jeppe Carlsen, former lead gameplay designer at Limbo studio Playdead, explains that he likes to keep things as simple as possible. His approach is an economical one: the trick, he says, is to add “the smallest thing that gives the most value”. For his new game, Cocoon, that meant figuring out the “added value” of each and every puzzle; these couldn’t simply be fun, but instead had to…

Developer The Game Kitchen Publisher Team17 Format PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series Origin Spain Release Summer We wake up in a dark chamber, surrounded by corpses and rubble, and quickly find ourselves locked in combat with a gigantic monster. You could be forgiven for raising an eyebrow: the opening moments of Blasphemous 2 mirror its predecessor almost beat for beat. As we duke it out with the tutorial boss, a jester-like figure wielding a spiked cartwheel, we sink back into the first game’s Dark Souls-inspired combat loop: dodge telegraphed attacks, carefully time swigs from your healing flasks to stay alive, memorise animation timings and launch counters. Just as in FromSoftware’s action-RPG series, your progression through the harsh world of Cvstodia is measured by unlocking shortcuts and reaching checkpoints, here represented…

Developer Copychaser Games Publisher Fellow Traveller Format PC Origin Canada Release 2024 At atime when publications such as Buzzfeed – to name but one highprofile example – are laying off staff, A ushering in a troubling “new frontier in media” with a reliance on AI-generated content, a game about the galaxy’s first robotic reporter could be considered both in questionable taste and excellently timed. (Perhaps more unwieldy opening sentences like this will help prove Edge is still written by human beings.) Tasked with sustaining – or maybe even improving – the trusted reputation of the eponymous holopaper, we’re certainly moved by this game to consider how doing a bad job might, in fact, be in humanity’s best interests. But for the purposes of a preview, we’re prepared to play along.…

Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Developer Tunic Team Publisher Finji Origin Canada Release 2022 Sitting down with Andrew Shouldice, fresh off the back of a double BAFTA win, conversation immediately wanders away from the topic of how this award-winning game was made, and onto the question of notebooks. Shouldice leans over the table to admire ours, a little black Moleskine affair, and it’s only after a good few minutes on the relative benefits of stitched versus ringbound that we actually get back to the point at hand. An unexpected tangent, certainly – but one that, as it turns out, speaks to the important role such apparatus played in Tunic’s development. This shouldn’t, perhaps, come as a surprise. After all, Tunic makes clear Shouldice’s fondness for good…

Sequels and remakes might be very different nuts to crack, but there are commonalities between them – not least the need to consider the audience you’re catering to. Are you primarily targeting existing players, or would you rather tailor your game to new ones? The former will naturally arrive with certain expectations: sometimes that works to your advantage, but it could also mean they’re harder to please. But to those unfamiliar with what you’re offering, there are two options. You could hold the door open a little wider and motion them in with a smile – at risk, of course, of upsetting your existing clientele. Or you could, metaphorically speaking, invite in your regulars, letting go of the door once they’re inside and allowing it to close in the faces…

Roughly halfway through Diablo IV’s main questline, we hit upon an attack combo of magnificent sensory delight. Our elemental sorceress freezes the demons surrounding her, calls down a blizzard over their heads, and summons a phantasmal hydra to hurl fireballs from a distance, all before retreating to throw a few projectiles of her own and dish out arcs of lightning at any stragglers that have escaped the snare. It’s a rush of high-voltage, monster-mulching ultraviolence that’s as satisfying for the delicious crunch that accompanies each shattered demon as the ever-higher numbers that sprout out of their tumbling heads. When it’s over, we do it again. And then many more times after that. The legions of hell are so numerous that during the time it takes to decimate them we go…

Nightdive CEO and System Shock game director Stephen Kick (right) can finally get some sleep now. Behind closed doors, System Shock’s seven-year development not only raised the possibility that a final release would never actually arrive, but it also threatened the future of Nightdive as a whole. In running the company and also the game’s production, Kick has been deprived of many a night’s rest, but somehow the finished game bears none of the scars of what he reveals was a deeply troubled project. Are you able to talk about the delays in making the game? Now feels like an opportunity to address any preconceptions that come with any game that has endured a long time in development. I would say that our story is unique in that, for a…

This eco-conscious action adventure carries itself with the earnest solemnity of the last episode of a BBC nature programme, in which David Attenborough outlines the dire threat faced by Earth and its animal inhabitants. Dragged out to eight hours, however, and shorn of the passion and charisma of the beloved naturalist, the result is crushingly dull. Inviting you to guide life spirit Gaia through a series of dismal postapocalyptic environments – impressive more in scale than imagination – Piccolo Studio might have sought to avoid preachiness, yet After Us nevertheless amounts to a wordless reproof. Offering nary a hint at how we might avoid this dreadful mess, it simply offers up these grim tableaux depicting the devastating effects humanity’s myriad failings have had on our planet, gesturing emptily as if…

H aving immediately struck gold four years ago with the physics-powered absurdist comedy of What The Golf?, Danish studio Triband confronted a challenge similar to the one Nintendo EPD faced with the WarioWare series. How do you recapture that crucial element of surprise – as implied by the title – when people know what’s coming? Though of WarioWare’s sequels perhaps only Twisted came close to the original’s antic brilliance, Nintendo’s solution was to build each subsequent entry around new hardware, subverting existing microgames with different inputs and offering a fresh batch of quickfire challenges with unusual twists of their own. By dabbling in VR with What The Bat? and returning to mobile here, meanwhile, Triband has evidently worked out that an inherently imprecise control setup is the best possible fit…

Jordan Weisman’s CV is something to behold. It begins in 1980, when he co-founded FASA Corporation, maker of the enduring tabletop games Shadowrun and BattleTech; in the early 1990s, the latter series birthed a chain of BattleTech Centers, pioneering virtual entertainment venues with 3D networked combat. He’s also at least partly responsible for the MechWarrior videogames, the Crimson Skies universe, collectible miniatures company WizKids, and Harebrained Schemes, developer of assorted videogames, primarily based on Weisman’s creations. In short, then, he is something of a serial entrepreneur, always looking for the next big idea. His latest is Adventure Forge, a creation tool that lets players develop their own narrative games – digital ones, that is, though informed by his years spent working in tabletop gaming. “Some of my favourite stories are…

“We did say in 2021 that we are gonna push the graphics hard on this one. I think we’ll have the best-looking game in 2023.” As the first trailer for Alan Wake II arrives, Remedy comms director Thomas Puha gets stuck into some good old-fashioned grandstanding “This was a big one. And we didn’t win this one, but I’m sure we will win many of the future battles.” Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors puts on a brave face after the collapse of a $2bn partnership ”Hey Nintendo, quick question regarding Tears Of The Kingdom: how in the fuck did you make this?” Crop Circle Games’ Josh Scherr tackles the topic on so many developers’ minds “No shade meant to this team, but I really wish as an industr y we would…

What does it mean to be human? Plenty of fat nonfiction books profess to hold the answer. It is to believe in what is only imaginary; it is to cook one’s food; it is to use language, or maybe contraception. The huge audience for such tomes – an old genre, but one rejuvenated in our time by the success of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2014) – speaks to a deep identity hunger in the modern alienated human of late capitalism. Who am I? Who are we, shuffling around on this planet? How does any of it make any sense? Perhaps what it really means to be human is simply to love Goldy and to hate the Others. That, at least, is the bleak reading one is drawn to at points…

Developer Geometric Interactive Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Denmark Release 2023 The winged protagonist carefully places the orange orb, which instantly produces a rippling puddle beneath it. Trotting over to a second sphere – turquoise this time – our insectoid hero gently lifts it onto its back and carries it over to the first. What happens next is the most mesmerising three seconds of videogame you’ll see in 2023. Those wings flutter excitedly in anticipation, the puddle suddenly evaporating as the bug leaps and circles the central orb, like a satellite drawn into its orbit. The camera, positioned above, zooms in for a closer look as the orb opens up and the bug spirals into it, descending at great velocity until it touches down…

Developer Die Gute Fabrik Publisher TBA Format PC, PS5, Switch Origin Denmark Release Late 2023 Before we enter the Saltsea archipelago in the new narrative adventure from Die Gute Fabrik, studio lead Hannah Nicklin shows us a slide featuring the team working on the game – ranging from a writer who worked on Divinity: Original Sin to the author of an Arthur C Clarke Award-winning novella. It’s symbolic of the approach the studio is taking for its first release since 2019’s Mutazione. Though that game’s story was about a community, it was told through the eyes of one playable protagonist. “I was talking with Doug[las Wilson, studio co-founder] about it, and we were like: ‘Doesn’t the form belie the content slightly?’” Nicklin says. Saltsea Chronicles feels like an attempt to…

The most successful studio no one’s heard of? That’s certainly how it feels at Endnight Games, project director Rod Green and senior programmer Friso Kristiansen joke, as they talk about the unusual spot in the industry their studio occupies. Founded by former VFX artists, Endnight made its debut in 2014 with survival horror The Forest, which went on to sell over five million copies. Its recently released sequel, Sons Of The Forest, sold two million in just 24 hours. It might surprise you, then, to discover that the studio is made up of just 17 people – and when it made The Forest, on a budget of just $125,000, it was even fewer. And Kristiansen doesn’t expect to see it grow much further following the release of Sons. “The problem…

For a long while Tobal 2, the experimental PlayStation fighting game directed by Tekken’s creator, Seiichi Ishii, held the record for the highest number of playable characters within its genre. The game’s Quest Mode presented an RPG-like adventure in which your fighter plunged into a series of dungeons to face off against skeletons and shopkeepers, dogs and chocobos (it launched when publisher Square Enix was at the height of its Final Fantasy pomp), which could be captured and then deployed in one-versus-one battles. Many of these creatures had limited movesets and, apart from the odd palette swap, were functionally identical. But with 200 characters to collect, the game set an unassailable record. Eager to parry any suggestions that Capcom’s flagship fighting game is launching, like its predecessor, before it is…

When your entire world operates on the logic of a dice roll, there’s no such thing as a guaranteed outcome. But when Jade first joins our squad, with her X1-G Silent Ice sniper in tow, it comes awfully close. Miasma Chronicles’ tactical battles play out on a grid, abiding by the rules established by its forebears: two actions per character per turn, each hit decided by percentage chance. But before slipping into that mode, your team are free to wander in realtime, where enemy guards cast out a zone of vision as if carrying their own combat grids around with them. Developer The Bearded Ladies has been blending stealth and tactics since its debut, Mutant Year Zero, but, two games on, it remains a potent mix. There’s something agreeably old…

With its latest quiet science-fiction mystery, Cyan Worlds asks us to appreciate the value of the manual labourer. The inventors and engineers of civilisation’s great machines take a back seat here, lest we forget that the people who keep them running are no mere human resources. It’s a point underlined by the setting – otherworldly on one hand, pervaded with 19th-century industry on the other, that period marked by technological upheaval, and fuelled by mass exploitation. Firmament’s puzzles are appropriately large and mechanical, testing to see if you have what it takes to do a machinist’s job. Although, be warned: what it takes is not only intelligence and precision, but a healthy reserve of patience. The exact job in question here is that of a Keeper, apparently the last of…

L ove is surprisingly easy to come by, in the Helladjacent city of London. Mask Of The Rose begins by telling us that less than a year has passed since the capital sank beneath the Earth’s crust – and so we’re not expecting to stumble into our first kiss within minutes. A result of our character’s irresistible wit, perhaps, though we can’t claim too much credit: this romantic visual novel’s sharp writing means that almost any dialogue choice will result in some Wildean quip. Returning to Failbetter’s Fallen London setting, this spin-off is set considerably earlier than any other entries in the series, offering adventures of more intimate scale – certainly than on our previous visit, in 2019’s Sunless Skies. Your first task is going door to door, collecting census…